Question: Does this apply only to items that start at or over $200? What
happens to the $.99 items that end up over $200?
TGormley
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kirby McDaniel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, January 12, 2007 10:19 AM
Subject: [MOPO] SHILL BIDDING: BACK AND LOVIN' IT
Ebay has implemented their new hidden bidder program for items over $200.
This will fundamentally change the look
of ebay, and for me it diminishes somewhat the interest in listings
activity. I have always enjoyed seeing who is bidding on items within
the film poster categories. Of course, for other types of items - I
sometimes buy CDs on ebay - it is
not as important.
Bidders for these types of sales are now simply labeled BIDDER 1, BIDDER
2 etc. By moving your cursor over the
new bidder identity, you can check various details about the bidder's
history. But you cannot see the old ebay "handle."
Of course, ebay is trying to keep users from communicating with each
other, ostensibly to keep their customers
from being victimized by predator sellers. But really to keep from being
sidestepped. And I understand this to some extent. They have long had a
practice where e-mails from client to client must go through ebay's
system. Presumably they have a group of gnomes reading this e-mail
somewhere. Now this traffic for items over $200 will cease.
What does the list think about this New World ebay has created for
themselves? I'd be curious to know what
Bruce (Hershenson) thinks about it, as bidder privacy was long an issue
for emovieposter.com and for years, until
relatively recently, all of their auctions were private auctions. What
is ebay gaining from this.... and are they
losing anything? Will buyers feel more confident that the process is
truer to what it was intended to be?
As a dealer, I have at times supported other sellers on ebay by bidding
on their items early in their auctions
at a level where I would feel comfortable buying that item for inventory.
This also has the intended
effect of letting other bidders see our ebay ID and "about me" logo.
They can link from that to our "about me" page,
and learn about MovieArt. We have gotten some business from this, and so
I look at it as a passive kind of advertising.
Now this practice is eliminated -- except for items under $200, as I
understand it. Now the only way to amplify
this "about me" traffic is to list more items on ebay!
For items that I truly wanted seriously, I have used a snipe bidding
service -- and I think that most bidders who want an item badly either
snipe themselves at the very end of an auction or use a snipe bidding
service such as esnipe (a subsidiary of ebay!). While these snipe
bidding services sometimes fail, they are mostly reliable, and I think
the
consensus is that, under the old system, the surprise effect at the end
was helpful in achieving the lowest
price for the buyer in that other potential buyers did not have time to
contemplate paying more.
It seems to me that these latest moves only focus the "one bid" theory
that I have long used: if you really
want something give it your one best bid (as a snipe.) Because it seems
to me that this will only further
encourage shill bidding as well as all the other "bad bidder" problems.
Your thoughts?
Kirby McDaniel
www.movieart.net
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